In our production, David is one of our three Ernest Chappel substitutes ( along with Tom's "Porky" and Bart Shattuck's "Austin" ), providing the voice of the announcer intoning "Quiet, please..." at the start of the show, as well as the post-show credits. He has his own nationally syndicated talk radio show, and was kind enough to invite us on to talk about our production of "Quiet, Please."

Corey Klemow wrote:Check out the QP page on the SF site again - a feature article on the show was just printed today in "BackStage West," and now it's up on our site!

Just got through listening to the clip... and the first thing I thought when it ended was DON'T STOP NOW!!!

btw: whoever wrote the article got one thing wrong the fourble board is NOT the floor of an oil derrick... it's the platform that is about half way up... as I'm sure you all know But anyway... Everyone should Definitely go check out the SC website

Before Milton Berle and Lucille Ball helped make television the dominant form of home entertainment, there was the Golden Age of radio. In the 1940s, the top actors and writers created groundbreaking, edgy dramas, many of which are still powerful pieces of entertainment. Sacred Fools Theater Company is paying tribute to classic radio legend Wyllis Cooper with staged performances of two of his spine-tingling half-hour dramas. Cooper wrote these tales, reminiscent of Twilight Zone episodes, for the program Quiet, Please. Director Corey Klemow's moody production is captivating. The cast of four, in particular leading actors Tom Kiesche and Bart Shattuck, skillfully balance the intense acting style of classic radio with a modern sensibility to deliver eerie performances.

In The Thing on the Fourble Board, Kiesche is Porky, a one-time roughneck on an oil rig. Porky tells the audience about a night 20 years earlier when he and a surveyor (Michael Lanahan) found a finger in the mud that was buried thousands of feet and a million years earlier. But the finger isn't all that seems to have been unearthed. Shattuck takes the role of an archaeologist named Austin in Whence You Came. Austin and journalist pal Abe (Lanahan) spy a mysterious woman in Cairo the night before they open an ancient Egyptian tomb. The tomb is full of mystery-and danger.

Kiesche is an ideal roughneck. He exudes strength, which evaporates as his fear grows. Shattuck is believable as the haggard archaeologist, who seems unable to escape impending doom. Klemow's dark tone is assisted by the subtle lighting design of Douglas Gabrielle and the authentic effects created by Cricket S. Myers. These are two simple stories, told in an understated manner, with pleasing results.

The Sacred Fools Theatre in Hollywood presents QUIET PLEASE, two stage adaptations of Wyllis Cooper's radio series that ran from 1947 through '49. Unlike Cooper's first radio series Lights Out that catered to the supernatural, (and launched the career of a struggling playwright named Arch Obler), Quiet Please told tales that carried uncanny twists that teetered to surreal psychological mystery. Here, the 'Fools' create on the stage a pair of stories from this short running and alas, forgotten radio series.

The two tales told are Whence Came You?, where a archaeologist working in present day (1940's) Cario finds a local woman who is beautiful and somewhat mysterious and the disappearance of a journalist friend who tried to enter a recently discovered tomb. The other tale, and the best written episode from the Quiet Please series, The Thing On The Fourble Board, is about a discovery of a being of some kind seen around an oil rig and the 'roughneck' (oil well worker) who encounters such!

These two very short one acts are quite amusing and repeating, way too short! Then again, these two stories were written for a 25 minute radio show. These performances are not presented as radio shows per se, but staged dramas with moving actors and very limited sets. (Full fledged sets are seen within the minds of the audience!) Corey Klemow directs the cast that includes (in order of appearance), Tom Kiesche, Michael Lanahan, Bart Shattuck, Josh Petroski, and the voices of David Lawrence and Julie Lockhart.

Perhaps there will be more staged productions of QUIET PLEASE produced by the Sacred Fools. These tales are too good to be left for forgotten! Seeing these stories on stage gives the audience a sample of what would later be seen on television a decade's time ahead. A series created by playwright Rob Serling called The Twilight Zone!

I enjoyed hearing the audio file and was glad to see the positive reviews. Congratulations to everyone involved but especially you, Corey, 'cause it was your baby. (The sound designer's name is Cricket?! What a great name for a sound designer.)

After reading all these old newspapers where Cooper's name is spelled six different ways, it was kind of funny to read a review where his name was not only spelled correctly but Arch "Obler" and "Rob" Serling's names were not!

The negative review was interesting but I wonder if she is confusing understatement and minimalism with lack of "soul." On the other hand, she makes a point about the actor speaking too quickly and I was going to say something similar about the reading on the audio file. There's a lot of exposition to digest in those first few minutes and it seemed to fly by without much pause for an audience to absorb it. Other than the tempo, I thought the performance was right on the mark. And I was very happy to hear an actual seven seconds' silence in between David Lawrence's opening intonations of "Quiet, please ..." And such a nice piano version of the theme (minus the announcer's voice over -- just the way I've always wanted to hear it!).

Well, now I'm bummed because I don't live anywhere near L.A. -- Corey, you'll just have to take this show on tour!

MS wrote:After reading all these old newspapers where Cooper's name is spelled six different ways, it was kind of funny to read a review where his name was not only spelled correctly but Arch "Obler" and "Rob" Serling's names were not!

MS wrote:On the other hand, she makes a point about the actor speaking too quickly and I was going to say something similar about the reading on the audio file. There's a lot of exposition to digest in those first few minutes and it seemed to fly by without much pause for an audience to absorb it.

Tom himself actually felt his performance on the David Lawrence show was too quick; what happened was David asked him, off-the-cuff and unexpectedly, to do a little of the show, and Tom just launched right into it; the energy of the conversation and nerves ended up increasing his tempo. He's far more measured in the actual show.

What the reviewer is complaining about is the section where Tom explains how an oil rig works - where we made a deliberate choice that the show was about telling a story, not explaning arcane technical details. Tom very deliberately explains the "fourble" bit, 'cause that's important - then, from "When you pull the pipe, ya heist it up inside the derrick" through "You do it all over again till you got all the pipe out," it all flies by very quickly, and is capped by a "Y'see?" (pause) And, of course, nobody sees, which makes it funny! Ever had somebody who is an expert in something attempt to explain it to you, but they have no clue how to simplify things, so you're still completely lost? That's what we were going for. Judging from the laughter last Friday, that particular reviewer seems to have been the only one who missed the joke!

I'm doing another radio interview tomorrow (Friday, Dec. 3) regarding "Quiet, Please"... hopefully with Tom Kiesche in tow... being interviewed by Frank Bresee (who got his start in 1940 as a child actor on the "Red Ryder" radio show, and has been in radio ever since) for the Yesterday USA Radio Network.

We're recording it tomorrow morning, but the broadcast will (I think) be Friday night, sometime between 7:30-9pm PST. (Perfect timing, really, since my show is at 10pm Fridays!)

The Yesterday USA Radio Network doesn't broadcast locally, but you can hear it online at:

Also, Bobb Lynes and Barbara Sunday of the monthly show "Don't Touch That Dial" came to see the show on opening night, and I believe when their show airs again (which I think will be this coming Monday, Dec. 6, Midnight-3am PST on KPFK Los Angeles 98.7 FM - really Tuesday morning), they'll be giving us a little plug. Yay! If you're awake, you can tune in at:

And here's the L.A. Weekly's review, which Recommended us (with reservations):

L.A. WEEKLY (Recommended)

Corey Klemow’s decision to stage Wyllis Cooper’s ghost stories in the dead-serious storytelling style of old radio theater results in a somewhat stilted but endearing evening of two one-acts. “The Thing on the Fourble Board” and “Whence Came You?,” originally produced as radio dramas for the 1948 season of the horror series Quiet, Please, are the kind of supernatural tales folks used to repeat around a campfire or at a slumber party to get everyone spooked. Klemow attempts to create the casual feel of a dark living room where the family gathered to listen to the radio. “Quiet, please,” a booming male voice commands before the start of each one-act. In both scenarios, a couple of characters must die at the clammy hand of a strange apparition before the mystery is revealed to the bewildered protagonist. Awkward, albeit educational, technical descriptions of an Oxnard oil rig’s operations clutters “The Thing on the Fourble Board,” narrated by a former roughneck (Tom Kiesche), who found something startling down a drill hole. “Whence Came You?” involves more interesting details of a Cairo excavation site (who doesn’t want to hear about tombs and mummies?), where a couple of archaeologists (Bart Shattuck and Kiesche) and a booze-hound journalist (the funny Michael Lanahan) encounter the curse of a beautiful Egyptian princess. Despite or maybe because of the limitations Klemow has set on his actors, who mostly come off as very uptight, his obvious re-enactment succeeds in transporting us back to the time before entertainment got so diluted and dumbed down.